“Don’t think for one moment I don’t want you, Zyah.” He knew by just looking at her she took his statement wrong—she thought he meant physically, but he was determined to tell her what she needed to hear. He also wasn’t certain what he was going to do about their relationship, so he didn’t try to explain to her what he really meant.
“Sorbacov was a man who never wanted to be the president. He liked being the power behind the throne. He enjoyed secrets and fear. He had so many secrets of his own. He had a perfect family. His wife and son. He didn’t like women. He much preferred young boys. Very young boys. He also got off on torture and watching rape. He was highly intelligent, so he rose fast in politics, chose the perfect wife and a candidate to back and then became a very powerful man. He was smart enough to bide his time and keep his deviant proclivities under wraps until he could let them loose, and even then, he was extremely careful to make certain no one would live to tell.”
Zyah started walking down the road, tugging on his arm, moving him around the bike. His head pounded like the waves battering at the bluffs. The road tilted a little toward the sea. The surf rose up, wild and calling to him. She didn’t rush him to get to the part about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. She just let him talk. Start where he needed to. He appreciated that in her.
“Sorbacov established four schools to train assets, meaning orphans, children of the murdered political opponents. In some cases, as in mine, Sorbacov saw me and liked the way I looked and wanted me for himself. My father was in his army and had his own depravities. I didn’t find that out until much later. He sold me to Sorbacov. Sorbacov took me to the school. I was four.”
Her arm tightened around his waist. “Player.”
She said his name so softly, so intimately, he felt her in his mind, stroking him there. She made him feel as if he wasn’t so alone, the way he’d felt he’d been for so damn long.
“They say you really can’t remember anything that clearly at four, but I remember every detail. All of it. What we were all wearing. The weather. That watch of Sorbacov’s. He took it out and looked at it when they were beating my mother as if it was boring him. Her screams. The blood. He was annoyed when some of her blood splattered on his shoes.”
He tried to push the demons back, the ones escaping from the doors he kept closed and nailed shut in his mind. “I showed a unique ability for making bombs. It was insane, and no one could explain it. I tinkered with tools and could take apart and put things back together, and Sorbacov noticed. He brought in several instructors, and they would lay out simple bombs at first, little ones, and he would stand behind me while I put them together. I didn’t know what they were. It was fun. A puzzle.”
He stopped walking and faced her, looking down at her, pleading for understanding. “We were raped every day, repeatedly. Beaten. Not just with fists. Forced to perform all kinds of acts. To sit at a bench and put together a puzzle was a respite; it took my brain somewhere else, away from pain, away from something so horrific I could barely keep from going insane.”
Player had no idea why he expected Zyah’s dark eyes to hold censure, but he did. He felt guilty enough for both of them. He always would. Instead, those dark chocolate eyes of hers, so beautiful, held compassion for a little boy; not just the little boy but the fucked-up man as well. He didn’t deserve it, and she’d understand why in just a few more moments.
“Sorbacov was in a particularly sharing mood over the course of a week, and I was in a bad way. His friends weren’t gentle, so much so that he even made them stop a couple of times and I found myself feeling grateful to him.” He hated himself for that.
He stared at the crashing waves as they broke over the rocks just before they made it to the bluffs. He’d not had his fifth birthday, and he loathed himself for being grateful to Sorbacov, the man who’d had his mother beaten to death and who’d raped him and given him to his friends to rape, just because the man had told his friends to be more careful of him.
Player turned his face away from her, afraid that terrible burning sensation behind his eyes was something he would regret forever. “I was told to build a series of bombs over the next couple of weeks, and I was so happy. I could barely walk. Everything hurt, and I knew as long as I pleased him, built each one faster than the last, he wouldn’t give me to his friends, even if he used me himself, which he did, every time I finished one of the bombs.”